Using the exogenous event of oil price sharp decline in 2014–2015, this paper employs the difference‐in‐difference method to establish a causal link between the oil price decline and the Chinese firms' labour investment. Data of listed companies in China from 2012 to 2016 are used to explore this relationship. We show that the employment for firms in industries with significant negative oil price risk exposure increases 16.4% after the oil price plummeted, that is, the oil price decline significantly promotes the firms' labour force. Additionally, the positive effect of oil price decline on the firms' labour force is more pronounced in firms with higher risk‐taking, financing constraints, and industry competition. Lastly, we also document that the effect of oil price decline is through sales growth channels to increase labour demand. However, firms tend to overinvest in labour after the oil price plummeted. Based on these findings we suggest that oil price fluctuation should be an important factor for the Chinese government and enterprises when they make an economic decision related to the labour force.
The risk spillover among financial markets has been noticeably investigated in a burgeoning number of literature. Given those doctrines, we scrutinize the impact persistence of volatility spillover and illiquidity spillover of Chinese commodity markets in this paper. Based on the sample from 2010 to 2020, we reveal that there is a cross-market spillover of volatility and illiquidity in China and also, interactions between volatility and illiquidity in different financial markets are pronounced. More importantly, we demonstrate that different commodity markets have different responsiveness to stock market shocks, which embeds their market characteristics. Specifically, we discover that the majority of the traders in gold market might be hedger and therefore gold market is more sensitive to stock market illiquidity shock and thus the shock impact in persistent. On the other hand, agricultural markets like corn and soybean markets might be dominated by investors and thus those markets respond to the stock market volatility shocks and the shock impact in persistent over 10 periods given the first period of risk shock happening. In fact, different Chinese commodity markets’ responsiveness towards Chinese stock market risk shocks indicates the stock market risk impact persistence in Chinese commodity markets. This result can help policymakers to understand the policy propagation effect according to this risk spillover channel and risk impact persistence mechanism in China.
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